February 2006 PANPA BULLETIN | 37 When in August 2004, the chance of a new order for a weekly 3.6 million A3 products per week was offered, the Niederosterreichische Presse- haus (NOP) in Austria accepted the 'inline gluing' challenge. The NOP printers feared they would no be confronted with in- numerable cleaning processes and an unmanageable technology, but those fears proved to be wrong. NOP was predominantly active in the magazine market for lower and average circulation figures. About 150 periodicals ensured the basic utilisation of the compa- nies machines: two 16 page rotary units, a 32 page and a 48 page ma- chine. On all lines, there is the pos- sibility for longitudinal gluing. In August 2004, an existing cus- tomer wanted to award them a con- tract to do 3.6 million A3 products per week, initially 6 pages, later 8 pages. This not only triggered hec- tic activities in marketing by NOP, but the technical management of the company. In order to preserve the flexibility in production and to be able to produce this quantity on several machines, the targeted glu- ing had to be made possible on at least two units: the 16 page Roto- man and the 32 page Lithoman IV (with long-grain page layout). The job was given to Theodor Hesselmann, the managing direc- tor of Planatol, who has been mak- ing cross gluing units since 1973, mainly for eight page machines. With the assistance of MAN Ro- land, gluing capability was added to the two machines. It was new territory for Planatol, with the 32 page machine the first double cir- cumference rotary offset press they have equipped with cross gluing units. The tension relationships for the web guide around the glue cyl- inder, which at 1260 mm diameter matches the dimensions of plate and blanket cylinders, are indeed different to those of the single cir- cumference rotary offset units. The glue cylinder has two inserts with nozzle openings, through which the glue is pressed out as a result of the centrifugal force. In the folder superstructure, a new web guide path had been generated and a 300 kg heavy frame had to be set up which holds the laterally push- able gluing unit, weighing 830kg. The agreed start date of the Rotoman in December 2004 was kept without problems and 3.6 million prospectuses in six change- able versions have been produced on 65g/m paper. The previously only inserted eight-pagers are now held together by a maximum two millimeter wide glue line, with an accuracy of 0.2 mm. Gerhard Schmidrathner, the technical manager at NOP, said that after six month's production experience, the cross gluing units are unobtrusive. "We had to solve considerably more tasks elsewhere in the proc- ess than in the gluing units," said Schmidrathner. When the units are not in use, a tape is simply placed over the in- sert and removed when it is again needed. NOP has now managed to achieve 60,000 revolutions an hour on the Rotoman and is aiming to reach 65,000, while the double cir- cumference Lithoman prints reli- ably at 36, 000 revolutions. First published in Deutscher Drucker in 2005. The glue only sticks where it's supposed to Gerd Bergmann reports on the challenge undertaken by an Austrian offset printer to add inline gluing to their process. American paper enhances workflow PRINTING at three remote sites outside the city meant the staff of The San Francisco Chronicle needed a better way to manage their end-to-end workflow. "In today's prepress digital process, we need to be able to ac- cept files in formats not only for printing but also for distribution," said Pat Izzo, The San Francisco Chronicle's production director of production operations. The an- swer was to replace their old in- tellinet transmission system with the Newsway workflow solution. "We have a lot of ageing equip- ment here, and that includes our flexo presses," said Izzo. "That hasn't prevented us from install- ing new technology. NewsWay makes what we have more effi- cient and productive, and its re- porting capabilities keeps us bet- ter informed. Another key benefit for us is in NewsWay's ability to track pages through all the vari- ous workflow steps. To view this graphically, we have installed flat screen monitors beside each NewsWay PC workstation. "The software will enable us to track page flow and record pro- duction operations times such as editorial release, page transmis- sion, film and plate output, and plate to press times, allowing us to recognise and streamline our pro- duction operation. Our techni- cians are ecstatic; we can now do things, such as remote proofing, that previously were not possible. At The San Francisco Chronicle, NewsWay imports page layout data from an existing ALS system and create edition plans for the various zoned editions. It accepts page mod- ules from the CCI Europe front-end system, loads balance an existing al- faQuest RIP farm, assembles pages and automatically places them in an approval queue before routing them to their respective print sites. There, NewsWay burns text and furniture specific for each print site on to the image, then loads balance the data between six Agfa 3850 filmsetters. Once each plate is made, NewsWay receives a status message back for plate tracking. Reports are also gen- erated to provide detailed analysis of the page flow throughout the entire process. "NewsWay uses a standard browser and PC hardware to manage imposition, job planning, network workflow management, output management, resource scheduling and production track- ing," said Rick Shafranek, Vice President of Sales for ProImage America, makers of NewsWay. "The solution also performs load balancing on output devices to maximize throughput. For The San Francisco Chronicle we creat- ed soft proofs and output to both NewsColor hard copy proofers as well as to Agfa 3850 filmsetters. In the future, the newspaper will be able to upgrade NewsWay in order to support and drive CtP devices as well as interface to other existing equipment such as plate scanners." "ProImage have proved them- selves to be newspaper workflow experts, and the modular nature of the system has allowed us to install only the features capabili- ties of this feature-rich solution that we need now," said Izzo. "We have tentative plans later in 2006 to add additional modules such as Imposition, PDF, and com- mercial ad stitching to enhance the NewsWay system."